Quinn’s Reviews > On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous > Status Update

… being sorry, pays, being sorry even, or especially, when one has no fault, is worth every self deprecating syllable the mouth allows. Because the mouth must eat.’

‘In the nail salon, sorry is a tool one uses to pander until the word itself becomes currency. It no longer merely apologizes, but insists, reminds: I’m here, right here, beneath you. It is the lowering of oneself so that the client feels right, superior, & charitable. In the salon one’s definition of sorry is deranged into a new word entirely, one that’s charged and reused as both power & defacement at once.

The Vietnamese I own is the one you gave me, the one whose diction and syntax reach only the second grade level. As a girl, you watched, from a banana grove, your school house collapse after an American napalm raid. At five, you never stepped into a classroom again. Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all – but an orphan.’

…I imagine them flying from the blazed blasts unscathed their tiny, black & red wings jittering like debris that kept blowing, for thousands of miles across the sky, so that, looking up, you can no longer fathom the explosion they came from, only a family of butterflies, floating and clean, cool air, their wings finally after so many configurations fireproof.’

‘Sometimes I imagine the monarchs fleeing not winter, but the napalm clouds of your childhood in Vietnam.’